Crafting & DIY

DIY Christmas Ornaments

I stocked up on tons of crafting supplies at Michaels on Black Friday so the doodies and I have been making ornaments for weeks. I scoured Pinterest for cute Christmas DIY projects and saw some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ornaments that I knew Sophia would love. The doodies came with me to Michaels and Sophia kept grabbing boxes of green ornaments off the shelves and handing them to me. She was so excited to have Mikey, Leo, Raph, and Donnie on her tree. All the project required was green ornaments, ribbon, googly eyes, and a hot glue gun. The TMNT ornaments were so simple to make that I also made them with some friend's older kids and the kids completely took charge over the ornaments.

The glitter ornaments have been my favorite to show people because of their reactions to my using mini marshmallows to make them. I didn't want to buy a circle sponge brush (mostly because I'm lazy and didn't wanna go get one), so I improvised with a mini marshmallow as my brush. I chose some that were perfectly round and let them sit out for a few minutes to let them harden. Afterwards, I simply dipped them in Mod Podge, pressed them on the ornaments, and sprinkled glitter on top. It was the simplest DIY and by far my favorite too.

It's important to remember that Pinterest DIYs are usually hit or miss and the glittery pasta garland I made was a prime example of that. The garland took me a total of three weeks to finish because it turned out to be so tedious that I never wanted to finish. I placed pasta in a tall cardboard box and spray painted it matte white and red. Afterwards, I'd have to use a hair dryer to dry the suckers and then flipped them all so I could finish painting. A week later, I'd muster enough energy to individually paint each one with Mod Podge and sprinkle glitter over them. The last and final step was hot gluing the pasta to string. When I finished that part, there turned out to be even more work to do as the hot glue made everything look like a spider web with all of its hot glue remnants. Now that I've put the garland on the tree, it kind of feels worth it because it looks so beautiful but I won't be forgetting the effort it required anytime soon.

Nancy Hoang created Hopeless Thunder in 2007. She conducts the interviews, writes the articles, photographs the concerts, and handles the site's coding & design. (Basically, she's a control freak.) Her work can also be seen on music publication, CMJ. Contact Nancy for image licensing, assignments, or just to say hi.